Ether En-Gendered

I proposed a little experiment on Twitter. I asked people to take a well-known book, then to imagine the author of that book was of the opposite gender, or was gender-queer, and imagine what that cover might look like. Because we have these expectations in our heads already.

Maureen Johnson

And author Maureen Johnson’s “little experiment” helps me seed our cloud of weekly single-issue Ether here on Thursdays at JaneFriedman.com with a cluster of topics I want to focus on from time to time in coming months.

I want to tell you about it here first and see if I can get some outlines on a legendarily unweildy subject. Then we’ll have some structure. Maybe.

I’m thinking Ether En-Gendered because to “engender” means, primarily, “to produce by a union of the sexes.”

Literature—of absolutely all types, just turn off your genre head for a moment, please—should be en-gendered (not un-gendered, quit snarling), engendered as a thing of both male and female impulse and availability.

But we’ve long known we were failing on this. We’ve known that literature wasn’t escaping that surly bond of our fixation on the gender divides. As in so many things, we’ve turned away from the gaze-direct at the problem, and let it flicker off on the side, as inconsequential as that boilerplate that tells us any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental…

In it, Nawotka asked, in essence, if all of us in publishing wouldn’t run, not walk, if we could woo 47 percent of Americans who don’t routinely buy books.

Oddly, we didn’t run. We didn’t even walk. Know why? Because the biggest part of that target crowd is men.

Nawotka:

Perhaps it’s time for the publishing community to do something radical to entice new readers. I don’t know what that might be, but I might suggest that we start with something specifically targeted at men. My guess is that an overwhelming number of that 47% is male and it seems like a sensible proposition to target the most obvious group we know who don’t regularly buy books and read.

Mind you, as Nawotka pointed out, you can always find a glimmer of hope on the horizon, something promising, an inch taken where a mile is needed.

Darrelyn Saloom

Darrelyn Saloom, Ether sponsor (My Call to the Ring with Deirdre Gogarty) was one of only three readers to drop a comment on Nawotka’s post, but it’s a good one:

Southern Living has done it by adding author and Alabama native Rick Bragg to write a monthly column for the magazine. I attended two of his events this year in South Louisiana, and burly, oil-field men were there and saying how much they look forward to reading every new issue of Southern Living.

Just as an aside, Nawotka is also a member of a men’s reading group in Houston. It’s named, with unassailable accuracy, the Men’s Book Club. Guess how long they’ve been at it? Sixteen years. And in Texas. I throw no stone, I’m a South Carolinian.

Just this week, I was tweeting with Eoin Purcell, our good colleague in Dublin, about the fine set of MOS’s about e-reading (“man on the street” comments in broadcast-speak) that precede an interview show he did on UK ebook adoption. It’s the RTE Media Show from Athena Media.

The last voice we hear talking about e-reading in that pre-interview tape is a man who says he likes reading on the train with an e-reader because it’s:

More private, people don’t know what you’re reading.

Tuck that away for now. It’s an important clue, I believe, to the difference in how men and women read today. It may have to do with why we’re told that men are reading so much less than women (or won’t read fiction, or won’t talk about their reading, or won’t read anything without an explosion in each chapter, etc.).

That part of this ongoing discussion, we’ll encapsulate as: How Do Women Fare Both As Writers and Readers? What Subtle Signals May the Industry Deploy to Skew Our Perceptions of Women’s Writing? And Is There a Chance That Women Unwittingly Could Be Helping To Hinder Men Reading?

Heads or tails, mothers or not, we’re doing our best to create a rewarding personal life in a culture that’s overly concerned with maternity, and we’re trying to create a professional legacy in a culture that’s biased against women—and might still be after we’re both long dead.

Though women live on average five years longer than men, it’s no secret that their death rates are identical. One hundred percent, male or female, all of us die. So, if there were equal opportunity in news obituaries as there is in paid death notices, there should be an equal number of women and men whose lives get written up in the newspaper. But it’s far from equal—at least that’s been my impression reading The Boston Globe.

Of the 304 messages in my spam folder this week, 216 of them are from idiots "fanning" me on @HuffingtonPost.

Regular Ether readers will be glad to know we’re not headed for another round of “Where Are the Men at Writing Conferences?” In this long spring of conference-going, I’ve actually seen a better gender balance among attendees than in the past at major writing events.

At Writer’s Digest Conference East in New York, there was what looked like a far better blend of men and women in attendance this year than we’ve seen there in past years, maybe as many as 40 percent of the crowd male and highly active in Q&A, etc. (not always the case for guys at confabs).

So we’ll let that irritating conference-attendees subject rest for now, the blue buses and the pink buses are parking in more of the same lots, and I call that progress. Today, let’s pick up on the element of En-Gendered Ether that Johnson has provided: What Subtle Signals May the Industry Deploy to Skew Our Perceptions of Women’s Writing? Back to Table of Contents

I'm saying this in the back of a cab on my way to another work obligation. Lately, all I do in cabs is catch up on personal emails. & tweet.

Judging Your Books’ Covers: Are They Sexist?

Shirtless Men Kissing Beautiful Women. How long have I been going on about these romance covers that choke the ebook lists? The trend is somewhere from merely tedious to outright infuriating for all but the millions of romance consumers and the folks feeding that frenzy. (More power to you—the fact that I’d like to see what I hash as #legitlit in sway isn’t your problem. You keep those guys shirtless as long as the ride lasts. I’m just trying to get pants onto the literary team.) Where Johnson takes us this week is in the nearby neighborhood of that ubiquitous cover smooch.

https://twitter.com/Laura_Jennings/status/332454844021501952

In The Gender Coverup at Huffington Post Books, she does a thoroughgoing job of hitting the inequities now all but indigenous in the world of books—particularly their presentation to young minds (she writes YA).

So, we’re thinking about boys and girls and what they read. The assumption, as I understand it, is that females are flexible and accepting creatures who can read absolutely anything. We’re like acrobats. We can tie our legs over our heads…Boys, on the other hand, are much more delicately balanced. To ask them to read “girl” stories (whatever those might be) will cause the whole venture to fall apart. They are finely tuned, like Formula One cars, which require preheated fluids and warmed tires in order to operate.

It’s a good article, I hope you’ll read it all.

Maybe this idea that there are “girl books” and “boy books” and “chick lit” and “whatever is the guy equivalent of chick lit” gives credit to absolutely no one, especially not the boys who will happily read stories by women, about women. As a lover of books and someone who supports readers and writers of both sexes, I would love a world in which books are freed from some of these constraints.

Where she’s leading, and where we’re going, is that experiment she mentioned.

What she asked people to do was to reinterpret how the covers of known books might go if those books’ authors were, “of the opposite gender, or was gender-queer.” Cool results. And it’s the heart of our focus today.

We’re told not to judge books by [their covers], but… EVERYBODY DOES. That is what they are for. They are the packages that get your attention, that give you messages about what to expect.

A Game of Thrones, reinterpreted by Electric Sheep Comix

We have the original cover for George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones in the Book 1 (A Song of Ice and Fire) paperback edition from Bantam, and we have Electric Sheep Comix’s (Patrick Sean Farley) reinterpretation.

From Huffington Post Books, an original cover for A Game of Thrones, left, and a reinterpretation by Electric Sheep Comix

In the reinterpretation, you’ll notice that Martin has become not only Georgette (and a one-R. Martin, not two) but also “The Reigning Queen of modern fantasy.” From Johnson, on the exercise as a whole, not just in terms of this book’s real and reimagined covers:

The simple fact of the matter is, if you are a female author, you are much more likely to get the package that suggests the book is of a lower perceived quality.

Stardust, Reinterpreted by Librarian Monica Fumarolo

This is my play on Stardust by Neil Gaiman. Had a woman written it, I feel like the romance side of things would have been played up much more than the action/adventure aspects.

From Huffington Post Books, the first UK edition cover for Neil Gaiman’s Stardust , left, and a reinterpretation by Monica Fumarolo

As you can see, in this instance, Mr. Amanda Palmer has become “Nellie Gaiman” for a new play on the Stardust cover. I’d say Fumarolo might only want to take out that bit of the guy’s collar in the lower right corner. We like our Men Shirtless when Kissing Beautiful Women, you know.

Throne of Glass, Reinterpreted by Ardawling

We’re going the other direction in this one, the hardback cover from the Bloomsbury USA release Throne of Glass, reinterpreted by self-described “graphic hobbyist” Ardawling. Be sure to get “throne” into your next title, right? Ironically, author Sarah J. Maas does tweet as @SJMaas, the masculine-ized name Ardawling gives her on the reinterpreted cover. And even more ironically—as panelists at the Grub Street the Muse and the Marketplace conference this weekend discussed—this thing of women writing under initials has become so prevalent that it’s almost always a sign of a female author, not male.

From Huffington Post Books, the Bloomsbury USA hardcover for Sarah J. Maas’ Throne of Glass, left, and a reinterpretation by Ardawling

If we [women] sell more — and we often don’t — it is simply because we produce candy, and who doesn’t like candy? We’re the high fructose corn syrup of literature, even when our products are the same. It’s okay to sell the girls as long as we have some men to provide protein.

Franzen’s Freedom, Reinterpreted by Book Revels

Book Revels is a site for “young adult books and pop culture ramblings” from “Ellie”—who describes herself as “a twenty-something librarian completely obsessed with YA literature.” She gives us what Johnson calls “the soft-sell cover with the warm glow and the feeling of smooth jazz blowing off of it.” Which, especially on a title like Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom from Farrar, Straus & Giroux, easily reminds us, in the reinterpretation, of the “feminine products” advertising context, no?

From Huffington Post Books, the FSG original cover for Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, left, reinterpreted by Book Revels

About her reinterpretation, “Ellie” at Book Revels writes:

Here’s my take on Freedom by Jonathan Franzen as if it were written by a female author. I went with an image of a girl whose entire face you can’t see with a blurred background (i.e. the typical YA cover). I also chose a cursive font, which I see a lot of on “girl” books.

Lord of the Flies, Reinterpreted by BGM

This is the original UK cover for William Golding’s classic, then a reinterpretation by Toronto’s BGM. (Just as an unrelated observation, it’s interesting to see how many folks still don’t identify themselves online, even at their sites and on Twitter. They use pseudonyms, first names only, etc. Happily, we don’t have to work on that one today. It’s just worth noting that even as we encourage authors to identify themselves fully and use their names and faces as IDs, handles and avatars for best networking, an awful lot of Netizens do nothing of the sort.)

From Huffington Post Books, the UK cover for William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, left, and a reinterpretation by “BGM”

Note what happens here to Lord of the Flies as the author name switches to Willa Golding and this nurturing, protective evocation of the eternal victim, poor bespectacled Piggy.

There are more covers and reinterpretations in the gallery, which is well worth a bit of your time.

While this incident didn’t involve subtle (and not so subtle) signals transmitted by cover art, it has sparked plenty of healthy comment and debate. Wilson at PW points out that Messud’s character Nora Eldridge in The Woman Upstairs is “angry, really angry.”

Messud’s response invokes Chekhov’s line about not having to defend horse thieves and making a terrific statement about the expectation that women in fiction must not be allowed the harsher emotions male characters are granted. She makes herself perfectly clear on the point while also clarifying that Nora is a complex and rounded character, hardly an emblem of anger:

If it’s unseemly and possibly dangerous for a man to be angry, it’s totally unacceptable for a woman to be angry. I wanted to write a voice that for me, as a reader, had been missing from the chorus: the voice of an angry woman. So yes, Nora Eldridge is middle aged and yes, she is angry. I’m not trying to deliver some “message”—I’m not suggesting that middle age and anger are synonymous, or that being single makes you angry, or anything like that. Nora is an individual, one particular person, whose psyche has been formed by temperament and a series of circumstances. She has just emerged from a long period of suffering, the care for and loss of her mother to a hideous illness. She is trying—like each of us—to do the best she can.

And the interview gets even better when Wilson asks Messud, “I wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora, would you? Her outlook is almost unbearably grim.”

As if friendship potential is the criterion for a proper character.

Messud’s “For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that?” response has been repeated and celebrated for the past week. Part of Messud’s response:

If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities.

It’s an enlightening exchange, now being reinterpreted, itself, in many ways by folks discussing and sharing it.

So now it’s your turn: Expectations, signals, clues, interpretations, thrown by cover art in particular—how gender-biased can they be? How conscious is the publisher or designer of such bias and message? How aware of this element of bookselling are you on a regular basis? Fill me in, I’m all ears.

*steps out from behind curtain* I've been here all along, Twitter. I heard everything you said.

Related

Porter Anderson / @Porter_Anderson

Porter Anderson (@Porter_Anderson) is a journalist and consultant in publishing. He's The Bookseller's (London) Associate Editor in charge of The FutureBook. He's a featured writer with Thought Catalog (New York), which carries his reports, commentary, and frequent Music for Writers interviews with composers and musicians. And he's a regular contributor of "Provocations in Publishing" with Writer Unboxed. Through his consultancy, Porter Anderson Media, Porter covers, programs, and speaks at publishing conferences and other events in Europe and the US, and works with various players in publishing, such as Library Journal's SELF-e, Frankfurt Book Fair's Business Club, and authors. You can follow his editorial output at Porter Anderson Media, and via this RSS link.

Porter, I’m so glad you included the Messud piece. I had read and enjoyed the article and was stunned by the comments that criticized her physical appearance (I thought she looked great!). Had they not read the article, the caretaking, the deaths in her family, the pressures she’d been through while writing a novel? I was touched by the love, respect, and devotion she and Wood have for each other and the humanness captured in the piece of their shared life.

@twitter-18401026:disqus Hey, Darrelyn, I liked Boris Kachka’s piece on Messud and Wood very much, too. And I was glad to see Wood (Mr. Claire Messud) on Sunday in his keynote address at the Muse conference in Boston. And the comments on the PW piece are pretty fascinating, really, people going in all directions (which is fine, even great) on what was good or bad about the interview and about Messud’s “What kind of a question is that?” retort. Wilson, the interviewer, has dropped this interesting perspective into the comments: Don’t worry about the “poor reporter.” The fact of the matter… Read more »

It would be great to see ou at the Muse next year, Darrelyn – one of the best-run and most comprehensive (110 sessions) conference programs I’ve seen yet for writers, beautifully produced.

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5 years ago

Tom Bentley

Porter, I ran back to my “recently read” book nook to check out the covers. This may be the exception that proves nothing, but I couldn’t find many blaring tell-tale signs by some of the stated criteria that these were “girl” books: Karen Russell’s Swamplandia has a lovely open-jawed alligator ready to swallow readers, Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder is done in muted hues with a nice border frieze that has curled snakes as a motif, with a flitting dragonfly in the center, and Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior a blues-based carpet of intertwined leaves, not “frilly” in any measured sense.… Read more »

@Tom Bentley Hey, Tom, Thanks for reading and commenting (and dashing for books to check their covers, lol). Barbara Kingsolver had already come to my mind, too, in that both her Flight Behavior cover, as you note, and the cover for The Lacuna are, to my mind, neutral and attractive. Similarly, I think Didion’s covers, those I know, at least, have been easily the same or higher grade than those for male authors’ books. On the other hand, I still can’t warm up to the original cover for JK Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy. While I’m not sure I can call… Read more »

Gosh, Porter, a cameo tweet – and all I had to do was be sarcastic. 😉 Images on book covers are absolutely critical for kids, especially YA. It’s less about the appeal of the cover to the reader than it is the potential criticism: “you’re reading a GIRL’S book???” Having sold children’s/YA books for 15 years, I heard this time and again. It’s a real issue, more so for boys than girls, at least in my experience (personal and professional). For adults, my initial response was “oh, grow up.” Except…. My second book is about grieving friends who died from… Read more »

@twitter-240542789:disqus Hey, Viki, Thanks for putting in a couple of hugely relevant ideas here that yes, I do intend to follow up on as we return to this “cluster” of issues from time to time. First, the covers for young people. I’m as concerned about what they can do to tell boys “you can NOT be seen reading this book” as I am that some of them tell young women “If you die, you’ll be beautiful enough for your phantom lover to come to you.” (The latter is something I wrote about months ago on the Ether and got a… Read more »

Agree on almost everything, Porter. Girls’ books are a whole other issue, which I’m glad to rant about at any time. Though they, too, were infected early, it took too many years for women to be included in AIDS statistics. They presented different symptoms that were not considered “real” AIDS by the CDC. Consequently, AIDS wards were men-only (I have an anecdote about that in the book). Sadly, accurate diagnosis and treatment (they weren’t included in clinical trials, either) only happened when the medical community realized AIDS could be passed in utero. The reason the breast cancer community is so… Read more »

WHICH reminds me to share that link with our fellow Ethernauts: Viki’s second book in her Friend Grief series is “Fried Grief and AIDS: Thirty Years of Burying Our Friends,” available right here, go get it: http://ow.ly/kVlEn

This reminds me of a discussion I had with my 16 year old son. We were wandering through B&N looking for a book for a school assignment and discussing the accepted industry belief that “boys won’t read books written by women or with female protagonists.” As we passed through the YA aisle, he stopped and gestured to a shelf that featured cover after cover of female faces expressing ambiguous emotions (sadness, fear, revere?) and said “no, boys just don’t want to read books that have silly covers like these. If the cover looks like this, why would I think the… Read more »

@twitter-438465143:disqus Hello, Shauntelle, Thanks so much for this incisive comment. I think you’re adding immensely to the conversation here, particularly by bringing us the very “pure” reaction of your son. He couldn’t be more right. I get impatient with myself at times because I fear that I sound punitive and even selfish in saying that women’s attitudes about men and boys and reading are actually hurting us, not helping guys to approach literature. But you’re offering a perfect example here of what I mean by this, and I’m grateful for it. What your son is encountering on that shelf is… Read more »

@twitter-19042214:disqus Good God, Anne, That seems very strange, the suggestion you come up with a pieta (mother and child) for the cover of a book about nightmares. Unless it’s specifically focused on, what? — negative dreams in pregnancy or post-partum dreams or babies being waked up with nightmares? Or the bad dreams of preachers’ kids like me. (We probably see the Blessed Virgin in more dreams than most, I’m assuming, even us Methodists, when we eat the wrong thing before sleep, lol.) There’s just no accounting for taste, is there? 🙂 Crazy, and I’m just as glad that colleague wasn’t… Read more »

I think her suggestion had something to do with marketing the book to married women, who not only buy books with shirtless men kissing beautiful women on the cover, but also apparently books that touch their motherly hearts with images of the Madonna and child.

I have nothing of intelligence to add—(just finished Wolitzer’s The Interestings and can’t for the life of me figure out what that cover’s about in spite of the fact I worked for a publisher for 11 years and have no small amount of understanding of the cover design process)—but I await the next installment of this conversation with ‘bated breath. Seriously. Thank you.

You know, I think The Interestings’ cover ( http://ow.ly/kVn10 ) is simply an abstract. The book’s design is credited to Susan Walsh, and you certainly could get concepts of layered intuitions and expectations here, which, of course, can be found in the different experiences of the characters over time. Nice-looking but, no, not immediately informative, I agree. Sometimes that’s the intention, though I think it rarely helps readers get a handle on a book’s intent.

RE: “(the) sample is skewed to white, well-educated parents, say critics.” There is a reason for this. This demographic purchases the most consumer goods, especially women with minor children in the home. So yes, there is a (marketing) reason behind those “girlie” covers that you see. Publishers are targeting a very specific group of prospective consumers, and wisely so.

@twitter-32622094:disqus Hi, Lisa, Thanks for reading and commenting. The part of the Ether you’re picking up on actually is on a different subject. It’s about a PewInternet study looking at how adults with children regard libraries vs. how adults without them see their services. Regardless, I think what we learn from the exercise created by Maureen Johnson and so many good folks is that the “wisdom” of targeting specific groups of consumers with sexist covers is at least questionable. We know the marketing reason behind the covers. But the assumption that young women need to see such covers to understand… Read more »

I’m Gen-X, coming of age when young women still received mixed messages with respect to our “lot in life”. But I have faith — big faith! — that the next generation of young women will see a societal and cultural shift away from this limited diet of books that seem to place precedence on romantic fantasy/physical perfection.

@twitter-32622094:disqus Boy, I hope you’re right, Lisa. We need that shift sooner than later. I don’t see why we wait around. I’d like to see a lot more women authors stop writing this glut of romance for other women — it’s not, actually, very good that this is women doing it to other women, after all. Why would women who claim to believe in the empowerment of healthy womanhood keep feeding other women this adolescent worldview of themselves? What can we do to get the entire, booming romance community to stop and ask what it’s doing to its readers? Do… Read more »

Porter, I absolutely question some of the more unhealthy “tropes” in romance writing — even as a contemporary romance writer myself. It’s been said many times that these are only fantasies … but I find the whole “billionaire CEO/rescuer of young women” fantasy a bit disturbing. This trope obviously resonates. I’m just not sure that objectifying men for their money and young women for their innocence and youth is something I personally would ever feel comfortable writing about. Which is also why I’m not sure I will ever sell a single novel to a big publishing company! 🙂 There’s nothing… Read more »

@twitter-32622094:disqus More power to you, Lisa. There’s absolutely no reason that romance can’t be written in a healthy, realistic, meaningful way that doesn’t arrest women (or men) in adolescent fantasy and demeaning fairytale. Some of the best literary work in the world has romance at its core, for that matter. I’m afraid, though, that we won’t see a major shift in the quality and nature of romantic fiction for young people, especially young women, until some of the writers of this work start challenging each other to produce healthy, innovative, intelligent, grounded work. And reading won’t benefit until the same… Read more »

Exactly, Porter. “The media is the message” has a host of meanings, to my mind. As a communications major, I learned that the media has the power to influence what people care about — and precisely how much they care. Writers do shape how readers see the world, how they construct relationships. It’s up to us to temper that power (influence) with judiciousness and decide if we want to peddle real love — or a cheap imitation of it. Whenever I start a new book, I begin by asking myself, “What message do I want my goddaughter to take away… Read more »

@twitter-32622094:disqus Agree with what you’re saying here, Lisa. I think that publishers can’t be expected to do much saying no at the moment. (Look at the E.L. James case.) Publishers are in a slow decline and will, I’m afraid — and with some great exceptions, I hope — largely grab at whatever seems salable. So I think that as with so many things, most of the job here is going to fall to authors. The more independent the creative corps becomes, the more it will need to counsel itself and engage in meaningful discussions about what it’s supplying to readers.… Read more »

@twitter-32622094:disqus Agree with what you’re saying here, Lisa. I think that publishers can’t be expected to do much saying no at the moment. (Look at the E.L. James case.) Publishers are in a slow decline and will, I’m afraid — and with some great exceptions, I hope — largely grab at whatever seems salable. So I think that as with so many things, most of the job here is going to fall to authors. The more independent the creative corps becomes, the more it will need to counsel itself and engage in meaningful discussions about what it’s supplying to readers.… Read more »

I am with you on that and think it is setting young women up for abusive relationships, or at least accept some power difference with their “man” by submitting in exchange for materialistic gains and financial security. It is fantasy, but how many female readers will remember that, or even acknowledge that? The book cover of that particular trilogy is not that girly, and quite smart, but effectively alluded to the money part of the perceived love object, the rich CEO with his own company with very deep pockets. I think to get men reading is more tricky. I know… Read more »

@facebook-100000305346520:disqus Hello, Johanna, My thanks for your good comment here. Yes, I’m afraid that abusive and dominance trends can, indeed be part of the fallout for some readers of this type of material, especially when they encounter it at young ages. (I know some women in the business who are particularly concerned about what they call “beautiful dead girl” fiction in which the heroine dies and is gorgeous, attracting her phantom lover to her — this, of course, is the basis of so much of the sexist type of vampire work, for example, let alone the financial lure you’re mentioning.)… Read more »